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The most amazing part: > The organizers even worried DeepMind may have been cheating somehow. So Lupas set a special challenge: a membrane protein from a speci
by ramraj07 6y ago
The most amazing part:
> The organizers even worried DeepMind may have been cheating somehow. So Lupas set a special challenge: a membrane protein from a species of archaea, an ancient group of microbes. For 10 years, his research team tried every trick in the book to get an x-ray crystal structure of the protein. “We couldn’t solve it.”
> But AlphaFold had no trouble. It returned a detailed image of a three-part protein with two long helical arms in the middle. The model enabled Lupas and his colleagues to make sense of their x-ray data; within half an hour, they had fit their experimental results to AlphaFold’s predicted structure. “It’s almost perfect,” Lupas says. “They could not possibly have cheated on this. I don’t know how they do it.”
- pmastela 6y agoLike the old Arthur C. Clark quote goes: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” -- unless it might be cheating in which case throw them a curve ball. Kudos to the DeepMind team for making magic happen.
- rsiqueira 6y ago"A sufficiently advanced Artificial Intelligence would be indistinguishable from God." (Way Of The Future - AI Church)
- mensetmanusman 6y agoThat would require the AI to exist outside of time and space.
- drusepth 6y agoWell, this relies on the assumption that a God also inherently exists outside of time and space, which is debatable even among religious scholars.
- sudosysgen 6y agoI just had a discussion with a friend about this! It's indeed a very difficult question. We ended on the conclusion that God can't possibly exist outside of time and space in the Abrahamic tradition because he precedes the creation of the Universe, but I'm sure there's a twist we missed somewhere.
- lolive 6y ago“God is dead” Marilyn Manson.
- da39a3ee 6y agoHm. Nietzsche would seem to be in the lead there.
- lolive 6y agoWho?
- 015UUZn8aEvW 6y agoFirst as tragedy, then as farce.
- drdeca 6y agoI'm confused, because that seems backwards to me? How can He exist within time and space if He created the universe (including time and space)?
- sudosysgen 6y agoThe conclusion we came to is that such a being would have to have it's own, metaphysically superior, time and space, and our time would be a subtime of it as well as our space would be a subspace of it. The concept of a being subject to causality presupposes something akin to time.
- endtime 6y agoActually, it would just require that you can't tell whether or not it does.
- scoopertrooper 6y agoFrom the perspective of a human observer, an AI more or less does exist outside of space and time. It can travel at the speed of light through radio broadcast (with some caveats). It can spend the equivalent of a lifetime learning a topic in just a few days.
- sockpuppet_12 6y agoBut if you unplug the machine its running on, its over.
- pyhtel 6y agoAssuming the AI isn't a distributed system, sure
- mensetmanusman 6y agoThat is a plot of a novel. Humanity has to restart the entire global electrical grid to deal with an AI worm that accidentally causes epoch ending havoc :)
- Octopodes 6y agoWhich novel?
- Cthulhu_ 6y agoI think you could actually argue that it does; it just solved a problem in a relatively short amount of time (iirc the folding@home project has been crunching numbers for over a decade and barely got close), and it doesn't occupy 'real' space since it lives on various computers - it could occupy a whole datacenter, or be contained to a single chip, either way it's in a scale that humans themselves can never exist at.
- 14 6y agoI am happy you mention this. I was reading the article and thinking “wow the amount of scientific knowledge these guys need to know to understand what they are doing is way beyond me”. I work in health care and I always talk to clients about all the cool things they witnessed in their life. Cell phones, TVs, microwaves are some obvious ones I like to talk about. I sit and wonder what are the things my generation will get to look back on and say “I was alive when that happened”. I guess for many of us we will talk about how the internet was vs what it surely will be in the future, a shell of its initial glory.
- dekhn 6y agoIf I interpret this properly, they're saying they used the DM prediction (not an actual model, just a prediction) to do molecular replacement (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molecular_replacement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molecular_replacement) which sounds pretty audacious. I see it recently made it into the literature: https://journals.iucr.org/m/issues/2020/06/00/mf5047/index.html https://journals.iucr.org/m/issues/2020/06/00/mf5047/index.h...
- labso 6y agoI used to work in scientific HPC and seeing the amount what researchers used computing resources for folding was staggering. Just thinking how much this will speedup the research in coming years is to be seen. I am really hope full.
- jaredmoon 6y agoThat is amazing, very excited to see how this will effect the biotech industry.